As the nanotechnology field has developed, the demands on the improved measuring capabilities has increased, and during the last years, microscopy devices having more or less atomic resolution has been developed, and the demands for such microscopes is continuously growing. For this purpose, electron microscopy devices, such as scanning electron microscopes (SEM) and transmission electron microscopes (TEM) have been developed, and those electron microscopes partly fulfil the above demands. Further, different scanning probe technologies, such as scanning tunnelling microscopy and atomic force microscopy also fulfil some of the above demands.
Basically, in an electron microscope, electrons are used for imaging, instead of light particles which is the case in many prior devices. Since electrons have a smaller wavelength than light, an electron microscope can resolve much smaller particles than a microscope based on light transmission. However, since the magnification and resolution is high in electron microscopes, they are also more susceptible to vibration, drift (such as thermal drift) and other distortions. Due to this, electron microscopes are built in a way in which they are very stable, and they are commonly situated in special vibration damped rooms. Unfortunately, this makes electron microscope installations very expensive and high demands need to be met by the location of such a microscope. This also result in restrictions on which kind of experiments that may be made and what kind of samples that may be used in the microscope.